Wednesday, May 22, 2024 – HOUSING FOR ALL, A RADICAL EXPERIMENT

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2024

ISSUE #1241

THE ALLERTON COOPS

IN THE BRONX


NEW YORK ALMANACK

The Allerton Coops in The Bronx: Some History

May 20, 2024 by Guest Contributor

The United Workers Cooperative Colony (called “the Coops” or the “Allerton Coops” by residents), located at 2700 Bronx Park East, was a radical experiment in cooperative housing in the 1920s. Large numbers of Jews, fleeing oppression in the Russian Empire, began settling in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the late nineteenth century.

Some had already been involved in revolutionary politics in their homelands. Crowded living conditions, high rent, and economic exploitation in their new home attracted more to various alternatives to capitalism.

The United Workers Cooperative Association was one among many of these alternatives developed by working-class Jews, most of whom were laborers in the needle trades, one of the largest industries in New York City at the time.

The Association focused much of its early cooperative efforts on Harlem. Its largest and most ambitious project, however, was in the northern Bronx, where it bought land on Bronx Park East in 1926 in order to build a large complex of cooperative housing.

The Coops sold financial stakes in the cooperative to “tenant investors” at the rate of about half a year’s salary for working-class people at the time. As shareholders, residents had a say in the operation of the cooperative.

The Coops were a nonprofit cooperative, meaning apartments could not be sold by individuals. Departing tenants received their initial investment back, with interest, and the board of directors, elected by the tenants, decided which new applicants got the vacant apartments.

In the 1940s, the board implemented an occupancy policy that gave priority to Black applicants. A small number of Black tenants were already present as early as 1935, but thanks to this policy, the Coops became one of the first significantly interracial housing complexes in New York City, long before the end of Jim Crow in the South and de facto segregation in the North.

As the rendering from 1926 above illustrates, beauty was a chief concern of the shareholders of the Coops, many of whom had lived in the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side.

Apartments were designed with high ceilings, healthy ventilation, and windows oriented so that direct sunlight would fall into at least one room. Further, spaces in the complex were designated for a library, daycare, Yiddish-language schools, youth club rooms, a cooperative restaurant, and a lecture hall,

Ravaged financially during the Great Depression, the Coops began to recover slightly during World War II and was offered new mortgage terms by the bank in 1943 that included rent increases. The Coops was deemed a financial liability by banks and insurance companies at the time for a variety of reasons, including its small but significant number of Black residents.

Tenants voted against accepting the new mortgage, the bank refused to negotiate different terms, and the Coops became privately-owned apartment buildings.

Nevertheless, the legacy of housing cooperatives remains alive and well in The Bronx, with historic examples like the Amalgamated Housing Co-operative, built shortly after the Coops and remaining a cooperative to this day, and Co-Op City, the largest cooperative housing development in the world, built starting in the late 1960s and located along the Hutchinson River in the northeast Bronx.

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CREDITS:

This essay was first published in The Bronx County Historical Society’s newsletter. The Bronx County Historical Society, founded in 1955, is a non-profit educational and cultural institution chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. The Society is dedicated to the collection, preservation, and interpretation of the history and heritage of The Bronx.

Learn about The Bronx Historical Society at their website bronxhistoricalsociety.org.

Illustrations, from above: Artistic rendering of the Allerton Coops, ca. 1926, from the At Home in Utopia Collection of The Bronx County Archives; and Allerton Coops in 2017 (courtesy Wikimedia user Jim Henderson)

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